1. Technical Field of the Invention
This invention is related to network switches, and more specifically, frame forwarding techniques employed therein.
2. Background of the Art
Differentiated Services, considered a “soft” approach to Quality of Service, is a relatively new concept in the Internet community. Differentiated Services are a set of technologies proposed by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) which would allow Internet and other IP-based network service providers to offer differentiated levels of service, for an additional charge, to individual customers and information streams provided thereto. Under this regime, the header of each frame which enters a network router contains a marker which indicates the level of service that the network router would apply to such frame during transmission. The network router then applies the corresponding differentiated grades of service to the various frame which enter on the various ports. With the Differentiated Services approach, service providers then offer and provide to certain customers (not a hard and fast guarantee), a preferential grade of service for all frame traffic in accordance with the appropriate frame markers contained in the frame header. The more preferential grades of service offer lower frame latency (i.e., frame delay). During times of frame congestion, those preferentially-marked frames would receive preferential service.
Current Differentiated Services forwarding mechanisms are inadequate because frame delay and bandwidth isolation cannot be simultaneously assured without severely underutilizing the system resources in the worst case. What is needed to provide simultaneous latency and bandwidth guarantees is a frame forwarding scheme which combines both buffer management and transmission scheduling.